The reviews are in, folks, and it's official: Justice League is a fun superhero romp, but it's also a bit of a mess. While the film has almost universally been deemed a step up from the likes of Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad, it fails to clear the high bar set by the DCEU's other 2017 release, Wonder Woman. Long story short, it's not nearly as good as it should be.Justice League looks to have found itself in an awkward middle ground between the other four DCEU films. Sporting a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 38 percent as of this writing, reviews are registering at every conceivable point on the spectrum. Critics' reactions vary so wildly that actually reaching any true consensus is a difficult task. The positive reviews are glowing, and the negative ones are about as venomous as they come. Our Justice League review, for the record, definitely registers on the positive end.

An important note here: while we usually reserve these brutal review roundups for the unanimously awful cinematic releases, the intensely negative Justice League reactions that follow sort of forced our hand here. But to be clear, the following reviews do not represent the film's critical consensus; they're far more hateful than most. Henry Cavill's CGI lip is just the tip of the iceberg, folks.

This must go down as the single stupidest, big-budget superhero motion picture ever unleashed upon an unsuspecting public by a major Hollywood studio. -- Chicago Daily Herald

The film is, plainly stated, terrible, and I'm sorry that everyone wasted their time and money making it”and that people are being asked to waste their time and money seeing it. I hate to be so blunt, but it simply must be said this time ... I know there's another comic-book company doing this across town, and it seems to be working out well for them, but if you have no clear sense of how to build one of these franchises in a functional, let alone interesting, way, maybe stop until you do! ... It's rather staggering, how pretty much nothing in the film works, not the semi-reliable old stuff, and certainly not all the new junk they've crammed in. Justice League sweatily wants to be both an epic and a romp, but hasn't the patience to truly be either. -- Vanity Fair

But for whatever combination of reasons, the end result is a broken film, swimming in bad CGI and forgettable mayhem, that you can't imagine any number of rewrites or reshoots could have saved. -- Daily Telegraph (UK)

It is almost shocking how bad Justice League is. When your film makes the viewer long for the coherence and scope of 2015's ill-fated "Fantastic Four," it is a sure sign something has perilously gone wrong. -- TheFilmFile.com

Justice League tips the balances back in the wrong direction. Although marginally better than Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad, director Zack Snyder's latest is still a profound mess of maudlin muscles, incoherent action and jaw-droppingly awful CGI. It is big, loud, awful to look at and oh-so-dumb ... Justice League feels like a bunch of disconnected moments with no governing theory behind it other than the fact that this movie has to come at this time to introduce audiences to characters whose stand-alone movies have already been promised to shareholders. It's not too late to re-think this whole thing and start over. Just keep Gadot around, please. -- Associated Press

Years from now ” or maybe even as you read this ” filmmakers are going to use the DC Comics Extended Universe as a prime example of how not to build a movie franchise. -- The Star-Democrat (Easton, Maryland)

A depressing reminder that Wonder Woman was an anomaly, not the new normal. Busy and boring and oppressively computer generated, Justice League screams we're back to business as usual. -- The Austin Chronicle

Justice League's less-than-inspired and poorly-CGI'd villain Steppenwolf has understandably taken quite a beating in the vast majority of reviews, despite the best efforts of voice actor Ciarán Hinds. That isn't exactly a shocker, but what is surprising are the critiques being leveled at Ben Affleck's Batman. Most reviewers rated his performance somewhere between passable and solid, but more than a few took aim at his apparent disinterest in the proceedings. Well, this obviously won't be controversial at all!

But Ben Affleck is unrelaxed and ill-at-ease in the role of Batman/Bruce, unconvincing in both the bat armour and the three-piece suit of the wealthy plutocrat. œWhat's your superpower? asks The Flash and Bruce replies: œI'm rich. It feels a bit late for this film to have cottoned on to a daringly heretical Batman joke that people have been making for years. Really, Affleck spreads a pall of dullness over the film. He doesn't have the implacable, steely ferocity and conviction that Christian Bale had; he seems to have a faint sheen of sweat, as if the Batcave thermostat is up too high, and his attempts at droll humour and older-generation wisdom make his Batman look stately and marginal. Maybe we should get George Clooney back for the role. -- The Guardian

The tone is all over the place, the plot's a mess and Batman should never be cracking jokes. -- ComingSoon.net

Not all the candy-coloured bombast in the world can disguise the fact that Ben Affleck, the bulkiest and mopiest Batman of all time, clearly doesn't want to be here, triggering memories of the #SadAffleck meme. Ben, we feel your pain. -- The Daily Review

œThe stench of your fear is making my soldiers hungry! Steppenwolf warns at one point, and we have to wonder: Are they trying to provide us all with wisecracks? The stench of this movie is making audiences sick? The stench of this movie is making critics ravenous? Virtually, everything out of the villain's mouth is funny, or at least every threat. -- San Francisco Chronicle

When the landscape of the superhero genre has become so rich and diverse, don't fans deserve more than a movie whose claim to glory is œThis isn't the utter disaster is could have been? In place of disaster, Justice League is a largely bland, forgettable affair ... Existing on its own merits, the movie is a giant nothingburger because it has little time for character development and too much retooling to tell a layered story ... The barebones story that we get lacks stakes because we don't really know most of these characters and Steppenwolf suuuuuucks. I was expecting Steppenwolf to be dull and easily disposable, but I didn't think he would be this atrocious. -- Collider

Big, loud, dumb and ugly that's "Steppenwolf," the mythical demon creature that's uniting the League. He's exactly like Ares, and that's a disgrace. He's boring and he looks ridiculous, like one of the weightless horned wights from a fantasy video game. The monsters of Warcraft looked more tactile. His mouth moves like a rubber band in a wind tunnel ... If a dog ate a box of neon crayons and puked it on a casino hallway carpet, you'd have the color palette of Justice League. -- Mashable

Let's face it, Steppenwolf is a CGI yawn, the action sequences are often a digital blur, the soundtrack defaults to loud whenever inspiration wanes and keeping it light becomes the first step to staying superficial ... In the end, this all-star team-up is too afraid of the dark to work its way into our dreams. -- Rolling Stone

Next: What Justice League 2 Needs to Do To Earn Better Reviews

Again, those reviews are far from representative of the movie's critical consensus, and they're certainly a far cry from what we thought of the film. What did you think of Justice League? Sound off in the comments.